Frank Norris was born to wealthy parents in Chicago in 1870, but he moved with his family to the booming city of San Francisco in 1884, where he used the people and urban life of his adoptive hometown as the subject matter for his later fiction. In fact, the central murder in McTeague is based on an actual vicious murder in a San Francisco kindergarten in 1893. Norris is also the author of Vandover and the Brute, The Octopus, and The Pit.